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Markdown vs WSYWYG
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Posted by 22111
Jan 31, 2015 at 12:38 PM
This thread had been titled correctly by Mr. Coulson, given the specific question he asked in post 1.
Then, though, we are on page 10 now, and with undeniably lots of valid info contained in this thread, its title has become totally wrong, since in this general meaning, it’s another false dichotomy, and I should perhaps told you so on page 1 indeed.
In fact, there is not the slightest reason to not have wysiwyg, it’s just some developers who ain’t able (or willing, which is worse) to introduce it into their respective product, and we all know this applies to one not-even-an-outliner product which has some followers here which hold it in high praise or even tout it as the tool of choice for any new task that may come around.
Have a look into traditional dtp tools, and which all offer markdown (or was it markup? even the appropriation and then reversing of the original term by some wasn’t helpful in any way), ON TOP OF wysiwyg, and that’s the only way text tools should work: Wysiwyg for the standards (bolding, italicising), and in an ideal tool, underlining could be used as visual indicator for some other formatting (since in the target text, underlining would certainly not be used - for texts to read, it’s quite deprecated, and rightly so); ditto for coloring and similar.
And then, in this nicely-(pre-)formatted “work text”, you’ll get (by kb shortcuts, hopefully) all those markdowns (or was it -ups?) you’ll need (and will happily use) for much more elaborate formatting of your target text(s) - note that ideally, the same text codes (be it -down or -up, whatever) would be transposed differently, depending on your target format (textbooks, pdfs, web sites…).
Also, those text codes are not always in a visually pleasant format, but COULD be put into a such a format if simply you refrain from putting the “original” codes of the dtp tool in question, into your original text, but use your own codes (and endcodes), which will make a much more pleasant texting/rereading experience in your original text; then, you replace these “nice codes” with the codes your dtp tool will understand…
but in ANY case, all those bolds and italics will be transposed “as is”, i.e. without the need of some additional encoding in-between, and ideally, that also should apply to other codes you will have visually-translated in your original text; as it is = for the time being, you will need to run an additional macro for these then, within your dtp tool (since current dtp tools don’t (?) have inbuilt macros in the line of “replace orange-colored text by margin encoding”; as said, since the dtp tool WILL replace orange text by plain text, together with the codes for orange text, you’ll be able then to replace those orange-text codes by margin codes or anything else by your macro.
Thus, it’s either wysiwyg AND text codes, for the more elaborate formattings, links, cross-references, etc, OR you simply had not been thinking enough before buying your text/edit tool. THAT’s the real dichotomy here.